The North Fork Teanaway River in northern Kittitas County supports stocks of bull trout and chinook salmon in the 5.83 mile reach between Lick Creek and Jack Creek. The highly functional flood plain that nurtures complex salmon habitat comprises 353.5 acres of riparian forest and meadow with single ownership. This project is Phase One of a habitat protection strategy,and extinguishes the development, timber, and grazing rights via conservation easement over the lower 96 acres of the flood plain, including 3.84 miles of stream bank. The landowner manages 20,000+ acres of commercial forest drained by this watershed and wants to augment timber revenues by subdividing and selling riparian land parcels. Real estate market pressures fueled by demand from the saturated Puget Sound region for accessible recreational/rural parcels, coupled with permissive local land use policies, combine to threaten the superlative habitat in the N. Fork Teanaway with fragmentation and function disruption. Conservation easement is the preferred protection tool because implememtation does not require the parcel segregation intrinsic to a fee simple transaction. Now is the time to negotiate a conservation easement with the landowner before multiple owners make implementation unwieldy and prohibitively expensive. This project facilitates salmon recovery by protecting 96 acres of highly functional flood plain in a naturally flowing tributary to the upper Yakima River.